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The Russian filmmaker calls the documentary "a poem about a multi-polar world."

ROME – The world premiere of Victor Kossakovsky’s Vivan la Antipodas! will be the second opening film at the 68th Venice Film Festival, organizers announced Friday.

The documentary, which explores the notion of Antipodes – the relatively rare instances in which a land mass is directly opposite the world from another landmass – was conceived when Kossakovsky discovered that directly opposite a lonely Argentinean fisherman he came across while traveling was the bustling Chinese city of Shanghai. Kossakovsky, who started work on the film years ago, called it “a poem about a multi-polar world.”

The out-of-competition work will juxtapose the events happing on opposite sides of the globe: Argentina and China, Chile and Russia, Hawaii and Botswana, and New Zealand and Spain.

The Aug. 31 Sala Grande screening will follow the world premiere of George Clooney’s Ides of March, already announced to be the festival’s opening film.